**Hit me when driving home at night, to an empty house, hitting every stoplight.  A little bitter, but trying to go for a little different images than the total cliché. **

            Taking a deep breath, she rested her head against the foggy glass of the bus.  Diesel fumes curled through the air as the rumble of an old engine coughed to life.  She shivered and pulled her jacket more tightly around her shoulders.  No real clue of her destination, for once she was just along for the ride. 

            He probably wouldn’t figure out she was gone until tomorrow night.  Vividly, in her mind’s eye a picture of him appeared.  Clapping his hands, shooting half-panicked glances up and down the street, checking every car for a familiar shade of hair.  Eartips pink and a confused, wrinkled forehead, he would start guessing, wrongly, at what kept her.

            She felt like life had been setting her up with false competition and copper plated prizes.  Snarling savagely and fighting to keep her rung, she felt like she was racing from stoplight to stoplight.  Jockeying for position only to be pulled up short every time. 

            He wouldn’t think to track her withdrawals.  She was the bright one.  With his smile calculated to milk money, a new caretaker would soon appear.  And she… or he, for that matter, would feel just as privileged as she had felt.  Another tarnished trophy to add to the pile. 

            A cough, a rib shaking hack, snatched her back to the unreality of her movements.  Unsticking her feet from the floor, she permitted herself a weak, tiny smile.  Land of the free, instead of the enterprising, for the first time in her life.  The viscous, soupy darkness swallowed her, illusions and all.